Lipah Snorkeling

My snorkeling trip for this month is to Lipah Beach in Amed. Actually Amed is well-known for its numerous snorkeling spots, but just several weeks ago I heard about this spot from my friend Dini the English teacher (thanks a bunch for the info! ;)) Two of the spots in Amed that I've visited are Jemeluk Bay and Japanese Shipwreck in Banyuning area, and I have to say that so far this is my favorite in Amed (my boyfriend said he liked Jemeluk better though).

The path to Lipah beach is very easy to miss. It's just a trail beside the main road without any sign of tourist attraction. It's good that I had been informed that the beach is right beside Euro Dive. When my boyfriend and I got there, we decided to rent a snorkeling gear in Coral View Villas & Restaurant so that we could change outfits and leave our bags there.

The snorkeling was good... The current was strong and the corals were average as in other Amed areas, but the fish were great! We saw a lot of different species, and some of them even swam in a large group. Luckily this time I had bought an underwater camera... yay! :D So here's our catch in Lipah:

See the blue dots everywhere? They're all fish!

Some bigger fish...

One of the big and solitary fish. I chased it many times just to get the picture.

Hmm... I wish I were more knowledgeable about marine biology to write better comments :P By the way, the trip from Amed to Kuta is about 1,5 to 2 hours, and this time we did it by motorcycle. So glad to say that after snorkeling for several hours, we went home with happy thoughts and flat bottoms (a.k.a "tepos") Hahaha...

Menjangan Snorkeling

It's been a long time since the last time I updated this blog. I guess life's so great that I forgot to write it down (hoeeks...) Haha just kidding. It's just the microblogging service makes me lazy to write a proper paragraph like this :P I like reading blog posts about traveling and fun activities. Actually there are also a lot things to write here in Bali, like Rip Curl's Girls Go Surfing Day last month, but first I will share my last weekend's trip.

One of my favorite activities here is snorkeling. Well, of course... how can I not like it? It's fun, cheap, easy, and energetic! I've been to several snorkeling spots in Bali (exclude Nusa Penida) and so far my favorite is Menjangan Island. I think if you've been to Bali several times but never been to this island, you've really missed out something! It is a small island in the northwest of Bali, near Gilimanuk, and is a part of West Bali National Park. Last weekend, my friends and I went there for the second time. Surprisingly, I thought it was even more impressive than the first time we went there.

In Menjangan Island, the snorkeling spot lies around the coastline. The spot is interesting because several meters from the shore, it's a shallow area (maybe just 2 meters deep) and suddenly after that, it's an abyss where you can't see the seabed anymore. Don't spend too much of your time snorkel above the shallow area. To truly enjoy the natural beauty of Menjangan Island, snorkel above "the precipice" between the shallow area and the abyss. It's such a stunning view: a lot of healthy corals and fish in various size and colors. The corals near the abyss are in a terraced formation, so they form some kind of "coral wall". Dive a bit and you can see the corals from the side, rather than from the top. The snorkeling spot is stretched along the south to the southwest part of the coastline, so you won't get bored swimming in the same area for too long. In fact, we spent 3 hours snorkeling there.

Oh by the way, this time we got the underwater pics, courtesy of Zul, our office's Tourism Minister :D

Of course this is also the right time for narcissism:

Google Dictionary Extension

This has been around for some times with the beta version, but if you just tried out Chrome extensions following yesterday's release of version 4 and are searching for nice and useful extensions, I'll show you one of them. The really nice thing I can find in the extension gallery is Google Dictionary extension for Chrome.

Sometimes when I read something in the internet and stumble into a difficult word, I will just look it up in an online dictionary. Some online dictionary websites offer tools like dictionary lookup toolbar that can be used to easily search a word's definition, but they do not come nearly as handy as this Chrome extension. Just by double-clicking the word, the definition will pop up in a moment.

Well, but as you see, the definition is not like in the usual dictionary where there are several meanings for a word and they depend on the word's function in a statement (noun, verb, etc.), so you may see something like this:

However, if the definition given is not satisfying, you can always click on the Google Dictionary Lookup in the omnibox and search for the word's definition. It's still far simpler than opening a new tab and go to an online dictionary website.

Hopefully someday there will be some natural language processing baked within the dictionary, so that when a word is clicked, it will give a more appropriate definition based on the word's function in a sentence :)